Collaborative Research: Patronage and Political Exchange Networks in a Municipal Legislature: Discretionary Spending on Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

来自不同学科的学者越来越多地同意，当代经济和政治生活的治理是通过复杂和不断变化的组织关系网络来运作的。这种复杂性往往掩盖了决策的轨迹，引发了对公民和各种利益集团问责的关键问题。公共政策治理系统为理解这些动态及其后果提供了重要机会，因为公共政策本质上试图在相互竞争的利益之间作出裁决，以产生某种形式的公共产品。这个项目考察了立法者将公共资金分配给在大城市提供社会服务的私人非营利组织的决定。随着私人提供的公共支持的福利服务的比例增加，非营利性组织越来越多地调解地方立法者和他们的选民之间的关系。反过来，非营利组织变得越来越依赖政府合同，公民体验的公共服务的数量和质量受到非营利组织的地点和吸引资金的能力的极大影响。立法者如何将可自由支配的公共资金分配给非营利组织揭示了社会福利治理的两个关键动态：立法者、他们的选民和当地非营利组织之间的赞助关系；以及立法者之间的政治交流关系。赞助涉及为分配给立法者所在地区的公共资源提供和申领信用。想必，成功赞助的回报是选民连任。政治交换涉及立法者之间达成的交易，这些交易导致公共资源分配给立法者所在的选区，和/或导致对立法的具体投票。本项目着眼于这一治理体系产生的网络结构及其对特定公民选区的影响，询问：(1)市议员与其地区选民之间的赞助关系是什么结构？它与市议员的连任前景、非营利组织的成长和公民的需求有何关系？(2)市议员之间的政治交流关系是什么结构？立法者的个人和地区特征是什么使他们更有可能发起和回报交换模式？(3)政治交换的结构与相应的立法提案是否通过有何关系？智力价值：这个项目贡献了三个不同的文献：(1)通过社会网络方法研究社会学过程，它提供了社区层面的赞助模式的当代图景，评估了立法者和非营利组织的相互依赖，并评估了对公民福利的分配后果。(2)公共行政学者关注的是国家行政管理最佳实践与分配公平的相对平衡。这是第一项考察赞助如何适应基于功绩的公共服务合同的更大系统的研究。(3)这个项目还通过理清地方一级的赞助和交换机制，促进了政治学对分配政治的理解。广泛的影响：结合之前由NSF资助的工作，这个项目将允许比较三种公共资源分配给非营利组织的机制：赞助、政治交换和竞争。项目结果将通过书面政策简报和向政府、非营利部门和媒体的受众演示来传达。该项目产生的数据集将为学者、从业者和政府官员提供重要资源。它还提供了一套程序模型，用于为具有类似可自由支配形式的公共资源分配的其他城市或州构建数据集。

Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines increasingly agree that the governance of contemporary economic and political life operates through complex and shifting webs of organizational relations. This complexity often hides the locus of decision making, raising key problems of accountability for citizens and interest groups of all kinds. Public policy governance systems offer important opportunities to understand these dynamics and their consequences, because public policy by nature attempts to adjudicate among competing interests to produce some form of public good. This project examines legislators' decisions to allocate public funds to private nonprofit organizations that provide social services in a large city. As the proportion of publicly-supported welfare services privately provided has grown, nonprofit organizations increasingly mediate the relationship between local legislators and their constituencies. In turn, nonprofits have become increasingly dependent on government contracts, leaving the amount and quality of public services that citizens experience greatly affected by nonprofits' location and capacity to attract funding. How legislators allocate discretionary public funds to nonprofits reveals two key dynamics of social welfare governance: patronage relationships between legislators, their constituencies, and local nonprofits; and political exchange relationships between legislators. Patronage involves delivering and claiming credit for public resources allocated to a legislator's district. Presumably, the reward for successful patronage is re-election by one's constituents. Political exchange involves deals cut among legislators that lead to the allocation of public resources to a legislator's district, and/or to specific votes on legislation. Focusing on the network structure produced by this governance system and its consequences for specific citizen constituencies, this project asks: (1) What is the structure of patronage relationships between municipal legislators and their district constituencies? And how does it relate to the re-election prospects of municipal legislators, the growth of nonprofit organizations, and citizens' needs? (2) What is the structure of political exchange relationships among municipal legislators? And what are legislators' individual and district characteristics that make them more likely to initiate and reciprocate exchange patterns? (3) How does the structure of political exchange relate to whether consequential legislative proposals are passed?Intellectual Merit: This project contributes to three distinct literatures: (1) By studying sociological processes through a social network approach, it provides a contemporary picture of patronage patterns at the community level, assesses the mutual dependence of legislators and nonprofit organizations, and evaluates the distributive consequences for citizens' welfare. (2) Public administration scholars are concerned with the relative balance of managerial best practices and distributional equity in state administration. This is the first study that examines how patronage fits into a larger system of merit-based public service contracting. (3) This project also advances political science's understanding of distributive politics by disentangling mechanisms of patronage and exchange at the local level.Broader Impacts: In conjunction with prior NSF-funded work, this project will allow comparison of 3 mechanisms of public resource allocation to nonprofit organizations: patronage, political exchange, and competition. Project results will be communicated via a written policy brief and presentations to audiences in government, the nonprofit sector, and the media. The dataset resulted from the project will offer an important resource to scholars, practitioners, and government officials. It also provides a model set of procedures for constructing datasets for other cities or states that have similar discretionary forms of public resource allocation.